Watch Dogs’ Jonathan Morin: Which Kind of Vigilante Do You Want To Be?

During last week’s Eurogamer Expo we talked with the creative director of Watch Dogs, Jonathan Morin. We’ve already posted that that the world will be open right from the start. Here’s the rest of the interview, with a written summary below.

Aiden is a man obsessed with surveillance. He’ll start out by hacking just a house, then a district, then the whole city of Chicago. The Ubisoft team wanted to let players explore the world with their own pacing, developing a skills tree system that allows you to pick whichever skills you want first, try them out and then expand into new skills. “Slowly but surely they get to master everything,” said Morin.

Within the game, you can control the city’s steampipe system, blowing steam up through the roads to combat cars that might be chasing you. Morin himself prefers the profiling system that lets you examine other people’s private lives.

Watch Dogs isn’t trying to scare people off technology but Morin does want to make people think more about how they should protect themselves when it comes to surveillance. He continued “We’re kind of in contradiction with ourselves in an interesting way. On one side, we’re talking about the risks of technology and on the other, the main gameplay mechanic is a glorification of technology.

“Instead of saying the enemy is technology and we need to fight back, we’re saying ‘Think of everything that can be exploited, then instead of being scared about it, that’s gonna be your tool.'”

Players will have a lot of freedom into how they want to play the game on top of the skills you unlock. It’s your choice whether to exercise certain powers for your own gain. Blowing cars and innocent bystanders up with a steampipe will bring consequences and they may not all be positive. It’s up to your own ethical code.

That said, being nasty brings in more gameplay so in that sense, the game’s mechanics are encouraging you to be bad. “The more nasty you are, the more media is gonna talk about you, the more you’re going to end up in situations where you see your face on television.”

Watch Dogs will be released for PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Wii U on 22nd Nov 2013. The PS4 version follows a week later on 29th Nov 2013.

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About Debbie Timmins (Weefz)

Debbie owns and runs The Average Gamer. She started her gaming addiction during the mid-eighties on a lovely green Amstrad CPC64. From those early days of The Hobbit (say to Thorin “Carry me please”) she graduated to Lucasarts adventures and western C-RPGs. A few years of Discworld MUD addiction followed. Eventually she found first-person shooters, Japanese RPGs and survival games and is now a fully-rounded gamer.
You can find her on Twitter as Weefz